Randal A. Koene

Randal A. Koene [1] is a Dutch neuroscientist and neuroengineer, and co-founder of carboncopies.org, [2] the outreach and roadmapping organization for advancing Substrate-Independent Minds (SIM) . Between 2008 and 2010, Koene was Director of the Department of Neuroengineering at the Fatronik-Tecnalia Institute in Spain, [3] the third largest private research organization in Europe. Koene earned his PhD in Computational Neuroscience at the Department of Psychology at McGill University , and his M.Sc. in Electrical Engineeringwith a specialization in Information Theory at Delft University of Technology. He is a Professor at the Center for Memory and Brain of Boston University , and is co-founder of the Neural Engineering Corporation of Massachusetts. Koene established the MindUploading.org website [4] and first proposed the term and specific approach called ” whole brain emulation” , the purpose of which is the achievement of the mind transfer to a different substrate. His professional research is the implementation of the whole brain emulation : creating the large-scale high-resolution representations and emulations of neuronal circuitry that are needed in patient-specific neuroprostheses. He is a member of the Oxfordworking group that convened in 2007 to create a first roadmap towards whole brain emulation. [5]

Koene has professional expertise in computational neuroscience , psychology , information theory , electrical engineering and physics . He organizes neural engineering efforts to obtain and replicate function and structure information that resides in the neural substrate for neuroprosthetic and neural interfaces . Based on NETMORPH, [6]Koene’s computational framework for the simulated morphological development of neuronal circuitry, his lab is creating a Virtual Brain Laboratory to give neuroscientists, neuroengineers, and clinicians large-scale high-resolution quantitative tools, analogous to the computational tools that have become essential in fields such as genetics, chemistry or the aero-space industry. Such efforts are robustly in place in the field of biologics of particular component physiology.